Jamshedpur, April 25 : A Maoist transit camp at the Naxalite-infested Saranda forest in West Singhbhum was today busted by the police.

The camp was located in a dense forest near Gundijhora village, about eight kilometres away from Baliva, where about 29 policemen were killed in a fierce encounter in 2004.

Superintendent of police, West Singhbhum, Navin Kumar Singh said they had chanced upon the transit point during a combing operation in the area following an encounter near Thalkobad in the Saranda yesterday morning.

Describing the camp, Singh pointed out that the rebel hub was large enough to accommodate at least 50 rebels. The cops also recovered utensils, leftover food and tents at the camp set up under the branches of lofty saal trees. Singh further said though the rebels had razed a few trees to the ground to build the camp, they had tried to design it to evade the eyes of the cops during aerial surveys.

It was a kind of base camp where the rebels were suspected to have been staying for long, but had to desert it in apprehension of being hunted down by the police and the para-military forces, the superintendent of police said, adding that the rebels might have fled towards the western part of the Saranda.

Incidentally, the cops had opened at least 100 rounds of fire at the Naxalites in a combat that lasted for more than two hours yesterday morning. Anti-insurgency forces had subsequently been reinforced in the area following additional groups of para-military forces.